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IN THE UNITED STATES, 



REMINISCENCE OF SLAVERY. 



By TIIOS. A. CHEEK, 

THE .^ELF-EDUCATED COLORED BOY OF PEORIA, ILLINOIS. 



PEORIA, ILL. : 



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PRINTED AT THE TRANSCRIPT BOOK AND JOB PRINTING OFFICE. 

1873. 



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THE ALLIANCE WITH THE NEGRO. 



SPEECH 



HON. CHARLES J! BIDDLE, 

Of Pennsylvania; 

DELIVERED IN THE ''^ ^ 

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE UNITED STATES, 
Marcli 6, 1862. 



The House being in Committee of the Whole on the state of the Union, Mr. 
BIDDLE addressed the Committee as follows: 

Mr. Chairman : I thank you for giving me the floor. I 
would not willingly let pass the sentiments which have just 
been uttered by my colleague (Mr, Morris Davis) without 
opposing to them sentiments which are, I believe, more char- 
acteristic of the conservative people whom he and I have the 
honor, in part, to represent upon this floor. 

As a citizen of the border State of Pennsylvania, the views 
in which I have been bred in relation to the institution of 
slavery have been temperate, and, I hope, just. It has not 
been to me an exciting subject, as it is to many with whom I 
am associated in this House ; for to some gentlemen, very 
calm in their judgment on all other matters, the mere word 
" slavery" seems to have much the same efiect that a red rag 
has on a bull. 

I have never been blind to the disadvantages and evils of 
slavery ; I have not been indifi'erent to their alleviation by 
practical, constitutional means; yet I have ever regarded the 
intemperate and aggressive policy of the political anti-slavery 
party to be as sterile of benefit to the negro as it has been 
disastrous to the peace, the prosperity, and the unity of our 
country. 

This war has brought us, at last, to see that there is a broader 
question than the " slavery question," though it is commonly 
preferred to narrow the discussion down to that. But, now the 
matter is brought home to us, we find that there is a " negro 



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question," vast and complex and embarrassing, even if slavery 
were blotted out of existence. 

From the earliest times, Pennsylvania has had her mode of 
treating these questions. Originally a slaveholding State, she 
adopted, in 1780, the policy of gradual emancipation, extend- 
ing it, however, only to the future-born children of the slaves 
then living; these children were to receive their freedom at 
the age of twenty-eight years. 

This great measure was the product of universal public 
sentiment, and was perfectly consistent with tlie general inter- 
est ; to effect it, no pressure, no compulsion from without was 
directed against our people. Had there been, from what 1 
know of their temper, I should judge that slavery would have 
existed among us to this day. As it was, the last slaves died 
out within the recollection of the youngest man upon this floor. 

By our common law, however, the negro had never been a 
citizen; so our highest court decided; and when the point was 
controverted, the people settled it definitely by amending the 
constitution, so that to be a " white" man is one of the necessary 
constitutional qualifications of the elector. 

On our statute-book, at this very day, is onr State fugitive 
slave law, far older than the acts of Congress on that sul)ject ; 
nay, older even than the clause in the Constitution of the 
United States providing for the return of fugitives. 

You perceive, sir, that Pennsylvania could have little excuse 
for joining in the insurrection against the fugitive slave law, 
or against the judgment of the Supreme Court of the United 
States denying citizenship to the negro, since we have our- 
selves furnished the precedents for both the statute and the 
decision. 

In our just indignation against the present vast rebellion, let 
ns not entirely forget that in too many of the northern States 
a chronic rebellion against distasteful constitutional obligations 
lias existed for many years. 

In Pennsylvania, our distinctive school of abolition has been 
marked by the mild benevolence of our venerable Society of 
Friends, whose Christian charity embraced both the master 
and the slave ; let it not for one moment be confounded with 
the cnt-throsit phUanthroj)!/, whose emblems are the torch and 
the pike, which has canonized John Brown as a saint of the 
church in which the negro is worshiped. You will rarely find 
in full membership in it a man born and bred upon the soil of 
Pennsylvania. 

From that church I am an open dissenter; I differ wholly 
from those who look upon the present as a " golden hour;" 
who regard it with exultation as the dawn of a black milleni- 
um. In rae, their hopes and schemes inspire disgust and hor- 
ror. 



An eminent member of the dominant party has promulgated 
his scheme for carrying on this war. He has promulgated it 
in many essays and speeches, to one of which parliamentary 
usage permits me to refer, since it was not made in his place 
in tlie Senate. He would not, it seems, trust to the valor of 
our armies and the skill of our generals. We are, like the 
ancient Britons, to call in an ally to fight our battles for us; 
our ally is to be — the negro. 

Southern men, it is said, fight and let the negro till the 
ground; we are to reverse this order. The negroes are to do 
our lighting for us; a million of them arc to constitute our 
army ! , In this pamphlet of Mr. Sumnek the black muster-roll 
is given. He says in his speech to the Republican convention 
at Worcester : 

"Careful eulculiitioiis demonstrate that, of this iiumb<-r there are upwards of 
one million of an age for military service; that in Virginia alone there are 
121,564 male slaves of an age for military service." 

If the distinguished gentlemen from Missouri and Ken- 
tucky wish to know the number of these black champions of 
the civil liberties of white men in their respective States, they 
will find it set down here. In conclusion, Mr. Sumnek asks 
this question : 

" Can. we afford to reject this natural alliance, inspired by a common interest 
and consecrated by humanity f" 

A noble lord once urged in the British Pailiament the em- 
ployment of the Indians against the British colonists in Amer- 
ica. He said, this noble lord, that " it was perfectly justifia- 
ble to use all the means which God and nature had put into 
onr hands." Then, sir, the great Chatham rose and blasted 
him with an eloquence that has become immortal. 

"That God and nature put into our hands! I know cot what ideas of God 
and nature that noble lord may entertain ; but 1 know that suoh detestable 
principles are equally abhorrent to religion and liuinanity- Such notions shock 
every pieeept of morality, every feeling of humanity, every sentiment of honor. 

"These abominable principles, and this more abominable avowal of them, 
demand the most decisive indignation. I call upon that reverend and this most 
learned bench to vindicate the religion of their God, to support the justice of 
their countrj-." ***** " I invoke thegenius of the con- 

stitution. 

"To send forth the merciless cannibal, thirsting for blood, against whom? 
Your Protestant brethren ? To lay waste their eountrj-, to desolate their dwel- 
ling?, and extirpate their race and name by the aid and instrumentality of these 
hell-hounds of war. I solemnly call upon your lordships, and upon every or- 
der of men in the State, to stamp upon this infamous procedure the indelible 
stigma of the public abhorrence." 

Sir, you will remember, too, that it is the standing reproach 
of American history against George III, that he called in the 
Hessian against his British subjects. Yet we are to call in 
the negro ! Mr. Sumner ask us, " can we aflPord to reject this 
natural alliance ? " Why, if, indeed, with our twenty millions 



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we cannot cope with six ; if it is we who are in danger of 
extermination, then, perhaps, we cannot afford to reject the 
alliance with the negro. A French marshal once smothered 
his enemies — men, women, and children — in a cave; and 
when he was arraigned before the public opinion of the world, 
he pleaded "necessity," 

Now, sir, no man can set limits to necessity, and no human 
intelligence can foresee all the exigencies of war; and I, for 
one, have been unwilling to give my adhesion in advance to 
any set formula for their determination. But, in the present 
aspect of this war, my trust is not in the help of the negro. 
JSTay, sir ; as one who has at heart the successful prosecution 
of this war, I would not venture to array against the Govern- 
ment in which I have a part, the sympathy of race. It is the 
great tie by which God knits into families those several por- 
tions into which it has pleased him to divide mankind. 

Do you remember when the East Indian rose upon his 
English ruler ? Do you remember how it froze our blood to 
read of men who clasped their wives and daughters to their 
hearts for the last time, and then slew them to save them from 
the black demons, athirst with lust and rage, who swarmed 
around them? Do you remember how the American minis- 
ter, an honored Pennsylvanian, stood up then in London and 
said to the British nation, " Men of kindred breeds, our hearts 
are with you in this struggle ? " ' 

Never did minister better represent his people. Our wrongs 
from England were forgotten then. Yes, we forgot that it 
was England that warmed in her bosom the viper of abolition, 
till its fangs were grown. Now, that they are fastened upon 
the vitals of our unhappy country she rejects the reptile that 
she fostered. 

Sir, I know not what notion that man has of the military 
character who thinks that the slave of yesterday may be the 
soldier of to-day. Of the slave you cannot make a soldier ; 
you may make an assassin. But the shrieks of white house- 
holds murdered, and worse than murdered, by the negro, 
would appall the hearts and palsy the arms of more of the 
supporters of this war than all the race of Ham could take the 
place of. To Mr. Sumner's question, then, I answer, we can 
aiford to reject this black alliance. It offers to northern white 
men a fellowship that most-of them abhor; it proffers to the 
southern white man no terms that he prefers to exterminatiou 
— it proffers negro equality or negro domination ; it drives 
the Union men of the South into the ranks of the enemy ; it 
opens to us a dreary prospect of a protracted, devastating, ru- 
inous guerilla warfare; it shocks the sentiment of the white 
race throughout the world. 

In the present aspect of the war, then, my trust is not in 



the negro, I trust in the mercy of Almiglity God to bring 
this distracted nation back to peace and union ; and, under 
his divine Providence, I trust to our soldiers' vak)r and their 
leaders' skill ; to firm and moderate conniels in the adminis- 
trotion of tiiis government ; the allies whom I would welcome 
are tlie Union men of tlie South. We all know how long and 
gallantly the Union men of North Carolina and Alabama and 
Tennessee strove till they were suppressed and overwlielmed. 
It is well known how the Union sentiment retarded the pro- 
gress of secession in all the southern States. It "is not dead, 
but sleepeth," that Union sentiment which men of the South 
have cherished, under perils that we have not been called on 
to encounter. Every dispatch that comes to us from Ken- 
tucky and Tennessee tell us of men rallying to the old tiag. I 
would have the old banner presented to their expectant eyes, 
not as the emblem of a military despotism, but as the free flag 
of a Constitutional government. I would see our armies, 
strengthened and restrained by discipline, moving southward 
with resistless force ; carrying everywhere peace to the peace- 
ful ; the Constitution and the laws to the law-abiding ; defeat 
and rout to the southern armies, which could never be rallied 
nor recruited where the people have their rights. War so 
conducted will knit our conquests to us, will double our 
strength and sap the enemy's. 

To those victories let us contribute our part. Let us not, 
by revolutionary measures, extinguish the rising hopes of 
those who love the Union. Let us not foster and stimulate 
and pander to public impatience. It was discussed here on 
this fluor lately what was meant by the great captain of the 
age when he said he was forced to give battle prematurely at 
Bull Run. Sir, I understood always that he meant that popu- 
lar impatience of delay precipitated his movements. Perhaps 
he remembered how, at the beginning of the war with Mex- 
ico, a congressional intrigue had nearly elevated over hini an 
incompetent politician — he felt that he must move, or perhaps 
again experience "a fire in his rear" from political batteries. 
Let us not repeat our errors, lest we expiate them by defeat 
or indecisive victory. Give time toour white Army, and you 
will not need a black one. 

I know that here I run counter to^sentiments that are often 
expressed upon this floor. The gentleman from Kansas, for 
instance, in his eloquent speech, which we all remember, 
charged it upon the President, as a grievous error, that he 
wished " to bring back the seceded States on the old basis ;" 
and the gentleman deemed it the height of satire and ridicule 
to describe " McClellan and Banks and Dix and Ilalleck, and 
the like, armed to the teeth and ready for the fray, with sword 
in one hand and the Constitution in the other, prepared to 



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administer death or the oath of allegiance, according to the 
stubbornness or docility of the subject." Sir, if what is thus 
ridiculed is indeed the policy of the President, I will give all 
a man can give to furthei" and support it. 

I refer to the speech of the gentleman from Kansas, because 
it is the frankest and clearest exposition that I have heard 
here of the doctrine of the party of which he is a distinguished 
leader. I would say that the doctrine of that party might be 
summed up in four words: "Thi-ovr the Constitution over- 
board." The gentleman from Kansas said explicitly, " the 
wish of the masses of our people is to conquer the seceded 
States to the authority of the Union, and hold them as suhject 
provinces." He combats, as a fallacy, the idea that consti- 
tutional obligations rest on our Government in its prosecution 
of the war. He says, " this principle must be repudiated, or 
it is obvious that we are tied hand and foot." 

Sir, the rise of the Democi'atic party in this country was 
the people's protest against the concentration of power in the 
Federal Government. ISTow, let some party rise ; call it the 
Democratic party — call it, if you will, "the white man's par- 
ty" — which shall protest against these schemes for black ar- 
mies and States held as subject provinces. 

Truly did Jefferson record the parentage of abolition at its 
rise, as a political proscription. He said, in a letter to La- 
fayette : 

"On the eclipse of Federalism with us, although not its extinction, its leaders 
got up ttie Missouri question, under the false front of lessening the measure of 
shivery, but with the real view of producing a geographical division of parties 
■whicti mitjht insure them the next President. The people of the Noith went 
blindfolded into the snare, followed their leaders for a while with a zeal truly 
moral and laudable, until they became sensible ihat they were injuring instead 
of aiding the real interests of the slaves, that they had been used merely as 
tools for electioneering purposes." 

Such were the words of Jefferson, himself opposed to slav- 
ery, but more opposed to the attempt to abolish it in Missouri, 
through the agency of the Federal Government. Of that at- 
tempt he said : 

"This momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled 
me with terror. I considered it, at once, as the knell of the Union." * * 

"Of one thing I am certain, that as the passage of slavery from one State to 
another would not make a slave of a single human being who would not be so 
without it, so their diffusion over a larger surface would make them individu- 
ally happier, and proportionall}' facilitate the accomplishment of their emanci- 
pation by dividing the burden on a greater number of coadjutors." 

Let me recall, too, that at that day a Representative of my 
own State, Henry Baldwin, of Pittsburgh, afterwards a judge 
of the Supreme Court of the United States, and one of the 
ablest, foresaw with a prescience that rivalled Jefferson's, the 
dire evils that were to arise from a geographical division of 



parties. In 1819 and 1820, on the floor of this Plonse, Bald- 
win advocated, with all tlie vigor of his robust intellect, the 
immediate and unconditional admission of Missouri. Sir, I 
voted the other day against the hill prohibiting the return of 
fugitives by the military authorities. That bill was carried 
through this House under the whip and spur of "the previous 
question," after a single speech in its favor from the gentle- 
man from Ohio, to which no man was allowed to utter a word 
in reply. He represented, without any chance for contradic- 
tion, that the military officers were usurping the functions of 
our civil judges and marshals, and were "running down and 
hunting down men, women, and children, as alleged fugitives 
from slavery." 

The simple fact, as I understand it, is this : that in locali* 
ties where the civil power is extinct, and all its functions are 
exercised by the commanding general in the performance of 
liis duty and his pledge to protect all constitutional rights, he 
has ])rotected rights to slave property. We, by our recent 
legislation, have invidiously discriminated those rights as the 
only ones which he shall not protect, and that at a moment 
when our armies are occupying regions where those rights of 
property are more valuable than any other. Our army occupies 
a county, say in Tennessee; the Union men welcome it; their 
slaves quit work to hang around the camp ; the owners appeal 
to the only authority existing for a remedy. The general, who 
decides everything else, must say, " Friends, I promised to 
maintain all your constitutional rights, but here I am power- 
less. Go down to where there was once a court, and if the 
judge, who is now a secession colonel, does not hang you as a 
Union man, he will give you a warrant, perhaps. If not, all 
your slaves must, practically, be free; civil society must fall 
into choas. So Congress has enacted." 

Sir, I did not choose to vote for that enactment. Whenever, 
in the enamalous condition of things incident to this war, it 
rests wholly u})on a military officer to sustain civil society and 
maintain the laws, I will not vote to restrict him in his duty. 
I believe that in the progress of this war we shall constantly 
see, as we have seen, the civil power entirely superceded by 
the military. By the rules of civilized warfare the conqueror 
owes protection to peaceful men in their rights of propertj^; 
I would not impose a penalty on our officers for performing 
his duty. Law and sound policy, in my judgment, dictate 
that they should perform it. Of course I do not mean to 
countenance the notion that slaves or any other property 
should he returned to men in arms against the Government. 
But, sir, I do not wish to see every column of our army carrying 
in its train a vast swarm of ungovernable negroes; a terror 
to every one but the foe in arms. Unless in battle, they will 



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devastate the land and stain the page of our history with 
horrors that modei'n civilization forbids, even in war. How 
this is to be prevented I know not, if our officers may not 
send them back to their labor; nay, as some here have stren- 
uously contended, may not even exclude thenWVom the camp. 

For these sentiments, I doubt not, I shall be styled " an ad- 
vocate of shavery." Neither that nor any other imputation 
shall ever deter me from voting and speaking according to 
my convictions. 

I desire to see a speedy and glorious termination to this war ; 
"^^d I would not ignore the lessons of history, which teach 
mat such a termination was never reached through sweeping 
confiscations and proscriptions and savage cruelties. You 
may make a desert and call it peace; or you may summon 
clemency to the aid of valor, and make your earliest victories 
decisive. I am a northern man with northern principles. In 
this conflict my pride and interests are all enlisted on the 
northern side, which is my side. 

It is in the interest of the North that I have ever been op- 
posed alike to northern disunionists and southern disunionists. 
1 would leave to my children the Union that our fathers left 
to us. 

Born and bred on the soil of the State, whose proudest title 
is to be " the Keystone of the Federal arch," I do not wish 
to see a new St. Domingo on her southern border. 

These are my sentiments as a Pennsylvanian and a white 
man. 



L. TowBRS & Co., printers, corner Louisiana avenue and Sixth street. 



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